It is standard practice for intellectual property authorities to classify applications and documents by one or more classification and/or indexing schemes. For example, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) applies the U.S. Patent Classification (USPC) system and the International Patent Classification (IPC) system to patent applications filed in its offices. Likewise, the European Patent Office applies the European Classification system (ECLA) and IPC to applications filed in its offices and the Japan Patent Office UPO) applies the File Index system (FI) and F-Terms systems to applications filed at its office.
More broadly, information vendors and database providers frequently develop and apply various coding schemes to documents that they index and provide on their services. For example, BIOBASE, a database produced by Reed Elsevier uses a proprietary classification coding system.ESBIOBASE [ONLINE]. [retrieved on 2004 Mar. 17]. Retrieved from: <http://www.cas.org/ONLINE/DBSS/esbiobasess.html>.
These classification and indexing systems are indispensable for the rapid retrieval and handling of information. They are essential tools in the efficient and effective examination of patent applications. Their application incorporates a high degree of intellectual input.
Unfortunately, most classification and indexing systems are very sophisticated and complex. Effective use requires a high level of training. For example, European Patent Office examiners receive two years of training on ECLA before they are allowed to conduct unsupervised prior art searches using the ECLA system. The U.S. Patent Classifications and the Japanese F-Term systems are similarly sophisticated.
Moreover, even within the field of patent information, skilled searching of the Trilateral Patent Offices requires that the search learn and search each of the national or regional classification systems separately. In other words, the searcher needs to learn ECLA to search EPO documents, the U.S. classifications to search U.S. patent documents, and the FI and F-term systems in order to search JPO documents. Even the tools and resources needed to do this are lacking. For example, there is no known English index of the JPO F-term system. In a recent symposium (FUJI, Yoshihiro “Providing Japanese patent information to non-Japanese users” Far East Meets West in Vienna: EPIDOS Users' Meeting on Japanese Patent Information, 2003Oct. 23, Vienna, Austria (Post-presentation discussion)), a JPO patent examiner recommended the following procedure for determining the appropriate FI class for searching a particular concept: First, on the EPO website (http://v3.espacenet.com/eclasrch?CY=ep&LG=en) to determine an appropriate ECLA class. Second, assume rough equivalence between ECLA and FI and search the corresponding FI class on the JPO website (http://www4.ipdl.jpo.go.jp/Tokujitu/tjftermenb.ipdl). This is very cumbersome and subject to error.
As a result the advantages of classification and indexing systems are beyond the grasp of more casual users and information professionals.
On the other hand, the rapid recent growth of fulltext-base patent retrieval services on the Internet has led lay persons and information professionals alike to rely increasingly on keyword searching. While keyword searching has its advantages and is easy to use, variations in terminology can easily lead to missed documents. Moreover, the intellectual product embodied in the classifications applied to the documents is totally lost.
In related art, D & B Duns Market Identfiers database on DIALOG (http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bI0516.html) provides for searching SIC descriptors as a search field. TRADEMARKSCAN provides for searching international class descriptors as a search field (http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bI0669.html).